Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Lord Monckton on the Pseudo-Science of "Climate Change"

Recent posts have involved an examination of ways in which the meaning of the term "scientific method" has been changing in basic and disturbing ways.

While I have focused especially on the scandalous refusal of the Darwinian research program to C14 date soft-tissue-presenting Cretaceous fossils, I was grateful to come across, on William Briggs' blog, a wonderful new post from Lord Monckton, the redoubtable scourge of that pseudo-science formerly known as "Global Warming"(subsequently renamed "Climate Change", once it became clear that there has been no global warming at all for the last fifteen years).

"The greatest error in the Berkeley team’s conclusion is in Dr. Müller’s assertion that the cause of all the warming since 1750 is Man. His stated reason for this conclusion is this: “Our result is based simply on the close agreement between the shape of the observed temperature rise and the known greenhouse gas increase.”

"No Classically trained scientist could ever have uttered such a lamentable sentence in good conscience. For Dr. Müller here perpetrates a spectacular instance of the ancient logical fallacy known as the argument from false cause — post hoc, ergo propter hoc. However closely the fluctuations in one dataset appear to follow the fluctuations in another, one cannot legitimately assume that either caused the other.

"Dr. Müller admits elsewhere in his editorial that mere correlation between one data series and another does not imply a causative link between them. Nor, one should add, does it tell us which caused which; nor whether all possible natural influences that might have driven both data series simultaneously have been allowed for.

In logic, though correlation does not necessarily imply causation, the absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation. During the past 15 years, notwithstanding record increases in our CO2 emissions, there has been no global warming at all. The former, then, cannot have been the principal cause of the latter.......

"If Dr. Müller had had a Classical training, he would have been made familiar with the dozen logical fallacies first codified by Aristotle 2300 years ago. He would not have attempted to draw any firm scientific conclusions as to causality merely from a superficial and in any event inadequate and uncertain correlation; and still less from a monstrousargumentum ad ignorantiam. Perhaps it is time to ensure that every scientist receives a Classical training, as nearly all of them once did."